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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.